I'm pleased to be a part of a small part
of this open access week. Uh, there are
other events that have happened and full documentation is available
and what I'd like to do now is turn it
over to Tyler Walters, the dean of the libraries
who's going to introduce our speaker this evening. Thanks
Karen. Much appreciated. So have a few remarks
. But of course we're here to listen to Professor
John Willinsky, who I'm about to introduce. But
thank you for coming this keynote address. We very
much appreciate your time here during open access week 2013
here at Virginia Tech. A little quick history.
You may or may not know. But you know
, there was a lot of initial open access activities
that happened here in the late eighties, Virginia Tech
began to host journals that were open to free or
free to readers as early as the late eighties and
through the mid nineties began working on electronic thesis and
dissertations, creating a database software and making them widely
available and known to the world and Virginia Tech past
its mandate to have E. T. D.
S required in electronic form theses and dissertations by 1997
. So we had some innovations here that have gone
on very well. Uh, more recently, just
two years ago in 2011, we initiated the V
Tech works institutional repository where we collect scholarship and research
materials of people ourselves, the university community here.
It's been well used early on and we continue to
amass materials in it. And this last year we
founded within the libraries, the Center for Digital Research
and Scholarship, which has been pushing forward on things
like new publishing services, new data management services and
repository services for the, for the university. It
also sponsors and operates the open access of pension funds
. So those of you are publishing an open journals
that where you might need a little bit of help
to meet page costs, there's a fund that can
help you on that. So you're welcome to talk
to us in the library about that. Uh today
we're here to welcome a true celebrity in the O
A. Arena as he as he shakes his head
. Professor john Willinsky at Stanford is a renowned academic
, john was invited to be our distinguished, innovative
residents in part due to his reputation as a thought
leader, organization builder, as well as his extensive
bibliography of books and articles, his academic credentials,
including master's in educational theory from the University of Toronto
And a doctorate in sociology of education from Dalhousie University
in Canada. From 1990 to 2007. He was
the Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology on the
Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia.
During that time he founded the Public knowledge project,
which is where many of us know know of john
today. He joins us from Stanford, where he's
the Costa family professor of education though he maintains an
appointment still at UBC in relation to uh directing the
public knowledge project. A quick word about the P
. K. P uh has been a wonderful project
and has created software. Is that several of us
, many, many probably some thousands of libraries now
use and and universities around publishing electronic journals as well
as electronic conference proceedings. We use those two tools
here and that's part of our publishing services within the
libraries here at Virginia Tech. As an author,
john has uh well many author articles and uh aspects
of open access, including ethics, economics, reputation
, uh the developing world concept of intellectual property and
the technical limitations in the online environment. Uh I
could go on, but I think I'll stop at
this point and we will hear now from Professor Lewinsky
is going to talk to us about what is it
about the history of learning that calls out for open
access to research and scholarship. And with that we'll
welcome john jones. Thank you. Tyler. Um
, that turned you off. No, I didn't
. Okay. Uh listen, it's a pleasure to
be here. Um, I'm wondering did you want
to spread out a little more? There's a there's
one section at the back here, I think some
people could still find if they wanted to reach.
Um, so it is kind of a humbling room
and I was kind of surprised and brian, whom
I also want to thank brian Williams, been a
great host today, brought me in here to kind
of give me a sense of the scale of the
presentation. So I have to make the talk as
large, at least as the room and uh let
me speak to the empty seats about this. I
want to talk about the importance of open access and
I want to approach it. Uh That's not a
given. I want to start with it as a
kind of question mark that's risen in my mind.
I've been in the business For a number of years
and it actually starts with Virginia Tech. I have
a great debt to this institution. Um and I
do want to begin by acknowledging that that in 1998
, uh That's all of 15 years ago, I
had never given a thought to open access, and
I had been working actually on post colonialism, on
the aftermath of imperialism and its legacy for education.
Um and I had a position uh that was called
the pacific Press Professor, I think Tyler mentioned that
, yes, in the pacific Press Professor, the
pacific Press uh in Vancouver, this is in the
university british Columbia in Vancouver pacific press, in the
true spirit of democracy owned both newspapers in town um
and they gave some money to the university and that
made me the professor. So I said, let's
take advantage of that, let's connect education and research
and journalism. Um And so what I did was
I spoke to the newspaper and we were going to
run a series. They were going to run a
series of articles and I was going to find the
research and share the at research with the and combine
them with the the newspaper articles. And we would
like bring the university to the public and we would
connect journalism and research and scholarship. And this was
the start for me because what happened was kind of
embarrassing. They ran a 65 day series on technology
and education. Uh, and for five days.
Well, first, it was embarrassing is they don't
make a decision about what this article they're going to
run in the newspaper until midnight the day before.
Do you know? Anyone worked on a newspaper?
Well, it's hard to work that way as an
academic when you're only going to have like 12 hours
of notice, luckily I was working with graduate students
who were still up at midnight because I wasn't and
we did get this out. But what was really
difficult is that the newspaper did a great job of
covering technology and education and we couldn't share the research
. The library said to us, we don't have
permission to put these research articles in 1998, they
weren't available online. We don't have permission to put
them online. And the few that were online,
we couldn't share them with the public. And at
that point is a professor of education. As someone
who worked in public schools, I realized that something
was terribly wrong. And so when I looked around
in 1998 to see what other people were doing,
Virginia Tech stood out because Virginia Tech had electronic dissertations
and thesis is. I didn't know about the journals
, Tyler, but they had electronic dissertations and thesis
is and that wasn't what interested me as fascinating as
they might have been about concrete and other kinds of
topics. But what did interest me was they were
giving away the software for electronic dissertations and thesis is
they made the software freely available. It was an
open source, that term hadn't been invented yet.
In 1998, there was free software, Richard Stallman
had stomped out of mit and established the free software
movement because he wasn't able to hook his computer through
the printer to the printer. But what I learned
from that listen Virginia Tech saw the importance of sharing
the tools of making available the resources to begin to
share electronic dissertations and thesis is we downloaded the software
, we struggled for six months to get it installed
and working and we no longer got it installed and
working and got our first dissertation into it. Then
the Library graduate studies. In fact, Karen called
me and said take that down. Where where do
you think you come off you? Lowly professor putting
up a thesis for the public to share. I
said I had the students permission. You didn't have
their permission. They pointed out to me the grad
studies permission. And so it was kind of a
failed and foiled project. Um but I never looked
back from that, we took the dissertations down actually
, someone said this earlier too, they never really
go down and we thought we took it down and
then it showed up somewhere else and we were continually
being embarrassed by it. But I decided at that
point we would develop a similar kind of tool,
a similar kind of approach. Um and that we
would focus that there wasn't an open access movement in
those days. There were people doing experiments with free
journals but wasn't yet called open access. And so
we decided that we needed to take the Virginia Tech
model. Have you build it and you should and
you share it, you build it and you demonstrate
that it can be shared, that we can have
as it were a basis for sharing and then you
share the software. What we also decided was that
Virginia Tech made it too hard, that we would
try to make it easier to share the software.
We would try to establish a way of sharing it
so that others could easily install it. And I'm
sure Virginia Tech has moved in that direction as well
because this was early days of open source. So
this is the principal and and the basis on which
I'm here. I think it speaks to this long
tradition, Something of 15 years. And so let
me tell you, talk to you a bit about
open access and let me give you a little more
history after that in terms of why I think it's
important. So when we talk about open access,
I just want to reinforce probably what you already know
. We're talking about the research and scholarship of the
university. We're talking about what we traditionally call peer
reviewed literature, that is literature that other faculty members
have looked at and examined, and said, this
is worthwhile. And we're talking about free to read
access immediately on publication, that somehow people have what
I would think of as a human right to know
, not everything okay, but they have a right
to know what is known and a right to share
. And Karen and I had an interesting discussion earlier
with tom about classified and military secrets and classified research
on this campus, and this university has taken a
stand on that, that every dissertation will get a
public and or a public oral defense on the basis
that what we do in the university is based on
this public sharing principle, not just out of the
goodness of our hearts, but because it's the very
basis of knowledge. So, the principle here is
that knowledge can only claim to be knowledge insofar as
it is shared and made public. And the extent
of that public nous is the extent of the certainty
or assuredness with which we can treat that knowledge a
single idea held by someone or held by two or
three people in a closed room really has no knowledge
claims. And the ideal here is that everyone should
have access to this knowledge that claims to be knowledge
, not secrets, not military, not national security
secrets, but claims to be a form of knowledge
. Everyone should have access to that. There is
no principle by which people should be excluded from that
, because it undermines that very claim. So that
basic principle of human right. I tried for a
number of years in terms of convincing people about open
access and not all that successfully, let me describe
To you the state of open access today in terms
of what that success is. So I've admitted that
I started in 1998. That puts me 15 years
into this movement and there's been many of us involved
. And how far have we got, what portion
of the literature is freely available at this point?
Um, and the best studies uh indicate and again
these are studies and and we don't have a certainty
about this, but there's certainly a level of probability
suggests that this year will have 25% 23-25 of the
literature will be open access, no matter where it's
been published. Okay, that means when you come
across it in google, you'll be able to click
on it and read it, whether you're a member
of this university or a member of the public,
whether you're a teacher in the schools or a doctor
working in a medical office, you'll have access to
about one in four, maybe one in five of
the articles you see now, that's still kind of
a lottery when you think about it that way.
When you think that your doctor has access 21 out
of four articles, what if those other three are
the ones that are really pertinent to your illness and
they get the fourth one and they say, but
hey, but I got it. It's like the
drunk in the street light and the keys, you
know that story. But while you're looking under the
street light and the drunk says it's the only place
there's light. So we want to be sure about
about increasing this open access. But we want to
understand the current state, This 25 that is available
today is available through to farms. There are many
faculty members, but not enough who put a copy
of their work up on the website when it's been
accepted for publication after peer review. The majority of
the publishers today allow that this is an amazingly wonderful
thing on the part of the publishers. If you
raise the money for the research, you write the
article, you give it to the publisher for free
, you review other people's articles for the publisher.
And for some reason the publisher feels like they might
have some obligation to you and that. Out of
that obligation to you, they say yes, you
can put the final draft after it's been peer reviewed
up on your website, but you can't put the
pdf that is copy edited and laid out beautifully and
set on a page. And so that agreement means
that potentially We could have the majority of the literature
, 80 of the literature because some publishers do say
no up unavailable. And the advantage of the final
draft is not that it's the final, that it's
still a draft. That is a disquieting thing.
Um but what's good about it is it can go
up immediately as soon as it's been accepted after the
peer review. The other way that the literature is
becoming open access, that's called archiving. Self archiving
. We have uh, Tyler mentioned it and forgive
me for escaping my head so quickly. The name
of that archive here. V Tech Works. Go
get it. V Tech Works. C or V
Tech works. Are you getting the double? I
know it's late in the day. Some of you
aren't okay, we'll explain it after it's kind of
a witty title. So V Tech Works for the
Public Good, I think, is the full title
only. We just cut it off at B Tech
Works. The other means that you can make this
work available. You can submit it to an open
access journal. Oh no, open access journals.
There are 10,000 at least open access journals in the
world. These are journals that publish everything immediately freely
available in its final copy. They have different economic
models. Most of these journals don't charge the authors
anything don't charge the readers anything. A good size
number less than the majority though, so somewhat less
than the majority charge article processing these which are complicating
things. I'd be happy to talk about that after
. But let's just leave it at that. So
these 10,000 open access journals are providing a good portion
of that literature. The 10,000 open access journals speak
to the status and prestige question. That's on everybody's
mind. The highest ranked journal, I will use
the best examples, of course, the highest ranked
journal in biology difficult field to score highly in because
very competitive is a journal called PLOS Biology Plus,
stands for public Library of Science. Class. Biology
is the highest rank. That means it gets more
citations per hour on average per article than any other
journal in the field. And that journal is completely
open access. That journal doesn't appear in print and
that journal has been from the very day it started
open access. It does charge an article processing fee
, but the importance is that it in fact,
it really set out one of the leaders of that
public library sciences, Harold Varmus Nobel Prize winner and
his purposes has been very much to establish the prestige
that can be achieved through open access. What we
do know about open access For those of you,
we're thinking about going in this route, you have
two choices. Remember, have you still have those
in your head? You can choose an open access
journal or you can archive that final draft, Although
some publishers will not allow it to about 63 64
65 of them will allow you to do that.
All the major publishers actually do it and some of
the small societies that are still not comfortable with the
concept and some of the smaller publishers that don't,
So we have two routes to get to open access
and we have only reached the point of 25%.
Um, but but again, I haven't got everybody
at Virginia Tech here in the room, so it's
understandable. This isn't a pressing issue for everybody,
but I'm kind of assuming that you're here because you're
interested and that I can count on you telling two
or three other people. I can deputise you.
This is open access week. I have the power
just this week to deputize people for the open access
movement. Uh and so I am deputizing them and
you will tell two or three other people and I'll
try to give you some more of the reasons,
some more of the basis so that this 25% can
become 50% think of that. The doctor in your
office has a 50 50 chance of being able to
find the article that will help in his diagnosis or
treatment, not necessarily of you, but if someone
in your family or someone and the family of us
all and then 75 and then 80 and then It
really gets difficult. I don't know if you can
appreciate that last 20 is going to be a huge
challenge extracting that part out. But my hope is
and really my belief is, and I think the
evidence is clear is that we're moving in this direction
. I know 25%, might not, might not
seem like the tipping point to you. Um but
I actually think it is because there is a whole
series of developments I want to talk about in terms
of of the support for it. Let me just
give you one good example. It is becoming a
federal law. There is a federal initiative in Barack
Obama's White House is getting behind this right now,
the National Institutes of Health which are the largest funder
of any agency in the world. Um and uh
put out well, it'll be interesting this year to
see what it is, but in the area of
$30 billion dollars in terms of research. And in
2008, they made a requirement that if you accepted
any money from the National Institutes of Health, Um
, you would be obliged within 12 months of publication
of any results to make that freely available. So
if you're going to take taxpayers money, that kind
of commitment, you owe something to the public.
You owe something to professionals working in the field of
health sciences and that is to share the work.
And the NIH says that it's about 60 years or
known about 80%. Actually, last figure I saw
80% compliance in that. Now, that means there's
a lot of literature that still won't be under that
obligation under that law. Um, but the current
research is leading to about an 80 compliance factor.
They are now saying that you will not get another
grant unless you comply. That's helping a little bit
, a little bit of an incentive. Some people
haven't taken it seriously yet, but when they submit
their next grant, it's very easy to check if
they had the results of their previous grant have been
made public. Um, then I think we'll see
an even greater compliance and Barack Obama's White House,
the White House Office of Science and Technology has requested
all of the other federal agencies that make grants over
$10 million$10 million. All of those agencies need
to come up with a similar policy. So we're
going to see federally funded research and a number of
states, California is in the process of passing a
similar act. Um, California, the state of
California does a lot of sponsored research, particularly in
the genome genetic sequencing area. We're going to see
a number of states getting behind this as well.
So we're getting, we're going to get a public
expectation, a sense that the work that is funded
by taxpayers, people have a right to and I'm
not expecting that people will come to this every day
. They won't come home at the, to the
dinner table and say, hey, did you see
that new article and new England Journal of Medicine?
Are you kidding? I think it was refuted by
the article in Jama and and that I don't imagine
that kind of disc. I would like that kind
of discussion, but I don't imagine that kind of
discussion. What I do know is that patients and
the families of patients are bringing medical research to doctor's
offices and I do know that they're bringing information,
health information that often is not research because the research
is not available. And so what I'm pretty certain
about is that the public will begin to change how
research is used and that if a family has a
choice, a journal article from a respected journal,
um, or a information from this pharmaceutical company,
well, maybe they'll choose the pharmaceutical company because it
will be more beautifully illustrated. That's for sure.
But the option of having quality research in order for
families to become empowered around the health of their families
in order for professionals to continue their own development,
it means a change State means a continuity of education
that I'm very, very encouraged by. So that
brings me to this argument that I want to give
you. That. That brings me to this case
. And the question that I've often asked myself,
and that is why do we expect this research to
be freely available? The research isn't free. It's
funded by the federal government. In many cases,
it's supported by institutions like this. In terms of
state support. Faculty members are raising funds from,
from philanthropic organizations to fund their research. So the
research costs money, but the sharing of it,
the cost of sharing that research has come down tremendously
with the Internet. And yet we still don't make
it freely available in a way that I've begun to
ask myself, why, why is this so hard
to get? So I'm sharing with you, not
the frustration of 15 years and only getting to 25
of the literature. But there's a little bit of
that I would have loved to be able to tell
you was over 50 I'm sharing with you a sense
that that we need to be able to convince people
of the importance of this. We need to understand
why this matters and how it fits and the way
that I've gone about this is the intellectual property route
. I want to consider the nature of intellectual property
and I think this is increasingly important and increasingly out
of view, I don't know how things are at
Virginia tech, but I know that at Stanford University
in Silicon Valley, we don't talk enough about intellectual
property and my School of education where we're we're learning
how to teach a new generation of kids to grow
up into an economy that is based on intellectual property
. And guess how much we talk about intellectual property
in our school of education. You're right. Nothing
. You had exactly that figure on your, in
your heads. We don't begin to talk about it
. And that's true in the arts and it's true
in the social sciences and it's not entirely true in
engineering, but it's true generally across the university that
we are preparing the young for an economy that we
are not discussing in terms of its most basic concept
. So that's one idea. But I want to
take intellectual property in another direction, I want to
say. And this is a little bit of a
difficult argument, but I want to lay it out
for you. I want to say that the intellectual
property that's produced by the university is a different class
of property that is produced by google, by Microsoft
, by apple by 50 cent by Neil Young and
Joni Mitchell. Our little Canadian content there, I
want to talk about intellectual property as in the university
, the intellectual property that comes from this learning as
a different kind of property in a legal and economic
sense and a historical sense. So, let me
start with the simple aspects of it. So what
I'm saying is that it's our intellectual property at some
level, that is it's intangible good. It's based
on people's ideas that are written down. It takes
a form of expression. It's covered by copyright and
by patent even by trademark and by trade secrets.
Those are the four classes of intellectual property legally recognized
in this country, but that there is a distinction
missing around the copyright around the intellectual property that we
associate most closely with the production of ideas in the
university and in that intellectual and even in patents,
I'll give you some examples of patents as well that
we have. We need a distinction that already exists
and yet isn't fully recognized because that distinction would help
us understand why this research and scholarship should be more
freely and widely made available. Let me give you
some examples. The simple ones to start with,
Fair use. Are we familiar with the copyright concept
of fair use? Fair use creates a shelter for
against copyright. Copyright is a monopoly That the creator
or inventor or author has. That copyright is a
monopoly that exists for a period of time, 70
years after the death of the author In this country
, 90 years for corporate ownership of property that copyright
is exclusive, That is the author can exclude anyone
from using this work For that period of time.
It's kind of difficult that 70 years after your death
, but apparently you can reach after your death for
70 years and exclude people from using your property.
But there are some exceptions. And and fair use
is one exception, and the fair use one explicitly
says for purposes of research, copyright is suspended.
Now there are limits. You can't copy the entire
book, but you can copy passages of the work
. You can use the work. There is a
use right associated with research. And that use right
is fundamental because that use right of scholarship allows you
to create additional value from the work that you're using
. That use Right enables you to turn one work
into two works or to turn one work into something
that is no longer effective because you have corrected it
, It's no longer doing damage because it was flawed
and you have critiqued it or that it is augmented
and supplemented and extended in some way. So this
idea that fair use legally protects research is part of
the balance of intellectual property, that intellectual property does
grant rights to the author or inventor, but it
also protects the public. And in fact in this
country, the Constitution talks about for the purposes of
promoting the progress of science and the useful arts,
not for the purposes of enriching the corporate sector,
not for the purposes of extending lunches to everybody at
google, but for the purposes of promoting science and
the useful arts. And this idea of the balance
is what I think we've lost sight of and what
I think the university needs to defend and needs to
in fact create a special class of property. Because
most of the intellectual property we use, it's hard
to see how it promotes the progress of science and
the useful arts and Virginia. Tech would seem to
me to be at the center of that combination of
science and useful arts since technology is the kind of
a stand in for that notion of useful arts.
So I've given you the first example fair use means
that the government has recognized in a legal form that
there is a different kind of property. Now there
is a property, there is fair use for education
and there is fair use for other kinds of activities
, uh reviewing a play, reviewing a movie,
you're allowed to quote freely without having to worry about
copyright infringement because of the public good not to promote
science and the useful arts. Although of course the
lone ranger and recent movies like that have done so
much to push back the frontiers of ignorance knowledge um
that we we wouldn't wanna make any judgments about that
. Um But let's let's begin because let me give
you some other examples of how this this legal position
. Another good example is let me think about patents
for one second. Their patent is a more extensive
right limited in years, 20-30 years. Is that
um patent is typically 20 years but their extensions and
things like that to take it to 30 years.
A patent is a requirement to make the invention public
, but to protect your right as an inventor for
anyone else creating it so they can't reverse engineer it
, they can't imitate it, You have a more
extensive protection uh Then you do actually with copyright where
people can recreate the idea, they just can't use
the same words. There's only one exception in terms
of patents where you don't have to get a license
to use the process that has been patented and that
is research. Um And a famous court case in
recent now famous court case around genetics around the right
to patent a gene, if you remember this case
from the spring and the right to patent a gene
was struck down by the Supreme Court and we should
all be grateful for that. Um And that right
in the defense of the myriad genetics is the company
that lost the case and myriad genetics into in its
defence said that there had been 8000 articles published on
the gene that they had patent B. R.
A. C. One breast cancer, a breast
cancer, one of breast cancer, too, are
the genes in question here. Um And their defense
was that we hadn't restricted research that we had respected
the right of research. Um but after you not
to get into the details of the case, um
government still, the Supreme Court, excuse me,
still felt um that the right to patent a product
or not even a product right to patent a piece
of nature um offended uh their sense of of what
was a fair patent. Um And so they struck
it down, but this idea that you can defend
a patent by by allowing for researchers and a legal
recognition of this distinction that I'm making, Let Me
give you a couple of others in terms of those
distinctions. One is the, the tax exemption I'm
teaching for the first time at a private institution,
I've spent my whole life in public education, public
schools as a schoolteacher and then public universities in Canada
. And so when I came to stanford, I
was a little bit uncomfortable with this private notion.
I didn't know what that meant. It was kind
of a club that I need a key to get
in and what would it be like on campus and
everything else. But what I really learned is that
stanford has to all of the time defend that.
It is a private institution for some kind of public
good because of it. It does not make clear
that it's involved in a public good. You know
what happens? It loses its tax exemption. And
that would be the end of us. Those donations
that support one third of everything that goes on in
campus, including many of the tuition breaks that students
getting the support they get in terms of uh being
a student at stanford would all disappear because all of
the donations are tax exempt. And so this idea
that even the private aspects of the university are respected
because they are seen as contributing to a public good
and that the money is essentially taken out of the
public circulation in terms of taxes and in terms of
redistribution through government. On the principle, the legal
principle that the university is contributing something, there's some
kind of difference in what the university is doing than
what google down the road is doing that doesn't get
this break. And so there is within american law
, a recognition of a different kind of property that's
coming out of the university in a number of ways
and the one I want to come to and the
one I want to use as a break in terms
of going a segue to history is the basis of
this university. This isn't only a public university that
receives state funds and thrives on contracts from the government
. It is a land grant university and a land
grant university has a special place from. But we
don't have these in Canada. We have public institutions
. In fact, we don't have private universities to
speak of. We have a few very small ones
. But the land grant university seems to me to
be a very symbolic, an important element. The
land grant universities started with the moral act in 18
62. And you might think of that as a
moral act, but it's actually more real act in
18 62. Um, and the idea that land
would be given to the university would be removed from
what the state controlled directly and given to the university
. What would be removed from what would be owned
privately and given to the university suggests a separate status
of property status. And what I particularly like about
that is that it talk it is a property that
is given on behalf of intellectual property. The state
says there were 40 acres are so given originally to
Virginia Tech, The 40 acres and then very symbolic
number in terms of American history. Those of you
who know You're history, the 40 acres was,
in a sense, a basis of transformation That that
40 acres of property would produce an infinite amount of
intellectual property and ongoing, sustainable, maybe not infinite
, perhaps too optimistic, but at least a sustainable
amount of intellectual property that would repay that contribution from
the state. And that anything that went on in
this 40 acres would not contribute taxes, would not
contribute all that did indirectly, But from the 40
acres itself. In terms of property taxes would not
be part of that contribution because of that benefit.
And the historical example I want to explore briefly with
you. And what I think establishes this notion of
a different property class comes out of that notion of
a land grant, because the land grant for me
stands for what I would call a social contract,
an arrangement of trust between society and the university.
And that is the land grant pays in advance for
the intellectual property that comes. It's a different kind
of contract. It doesn't say that there will be
on delivery, we will pay. It says we
will give you 40 acres without a clue of what
will come of it, except some kind of public
good And that we will give these 40 acres on
the basis that what comes of this will be something
that will be shared and that will increase the public
wealth in some way. And the tradition for this
, in terms of my own work in this area
and trying to find where does this idea come from
? Where did it start? Where would there be
a precedent for this kind of Grant goes back to
the monasteries, Goes back to early medieval europe.
So indulge me for a moment or two while we
think about monasteries. Um this university has a quad
, but a drill field. I get that right
brian a has it. So it doesn't have that
tight quad. Little feel to it, stanford has
a wonderful kind of quad with a arcades all the
way around so you can walk in the shelter around
the quad, shelter from the sun. I'm sure
you do get son. You haven't since I've arrived
but I understand I just missed the good weather.
But as a Canadian I do feel hey back home
trees, hills, no sun and just you know
, cold risk was nice. But at stanford there
is a mission design with mission architecture which has its
roots in monasticism. And let me explain to you
why I think there is a model here in terms
of the social contract that the monastery and the university
represents a deal a trade that says we will give
you land or sorry, we will give you property
in order to produce a different class of property.
We will give you property in a catholic sense for
the transubstantiation process by which you turn that property that
land into a new kind of property that has value
for everybody. And so that that example in terms
of the monastery, and then and let me build
a bit on stanford, but let me go back
to the monastery. So the monasteries in medieval europe
and why I've gone back to them at first was
very superficial. I have to forgive me for this
. I first thought maybe the monasteries were part of
the puzzle because they didn't have any private property that
all of the monks and nuns shared all of their
property. And even though they produced books and they
had pens and they had all kinds of material goods
, although they had vows of poverty as well,
but they had material goods, they were all shared
collectively. And that the monasteries were a kind of
network across europe when europe was terribly divided, when
there were no nations. And what we think of
today as europe, the latin west, the monastery
is formed a kind of national network, excuse me
? National, international, continental network in which books
were shared. Now, the there was nothing public
about this, the monasteries were all about enclosure,
that's where the quad comes from. They were inward
looking, with cloisters around a small square, typically
of medicinal plants or maybe a fountain. And the
monasteries were based on a social contract that goes like
this. There was no monastery until a noble had
given land and the Noble gave a plot of land
. In fact, when it first started, what
a noble would do. This is about the fourth
or fifth century, maybe the 6th century in the
common era, the Noble would take a clump of
earth to the church from the land that he was
going to give, and he would place it on
the altar and I just love the literal in this
, of it. And so you can imagine this
big piece of turf cut brought in by not by
the Lord himself but by one of his man servants
and be placed on the altar and everybody in the
church would kind of go, oh he's just made
a major and I recognize that that clump of earth
I bet comes from the field that's over by the
trees that over by the stream. And there was
a commitment to then build a monastery. Now the
basis for the nobility, The incentive was that the
monastery was land removed from his commerce, his warlord
like activities and place closer to heaven. The monks
and nuns would be as it were whispering into the
ear of God. And part of the deal was
part of the contract was that you need to repeat
the name of the noble and his family or her
family. Because one of the interesting gender things where
there were monks and nuns, there was a great
gender equality in this early medieval period and that many
of the monasteries were created by the women, by
widows in particular, but by women within the noble
families and those names of that family would be repeated
during the mass as if into the ear of God
And that at one in terms of those contributions,
that idea that the monastery was getting close to God
would be taken to the next step as the nobles
would require that they be buried on the monasteries grounds
because that land was so close to heaven that would
get them halfway there on burial And we cut down
the journey and security time and the lineups and everything
to get into heaven. And anyone who travels today
can note that getting halfway there is like that would
be terrific. Would be like having that special security
clearance where you could just get right in. So
this idea then that the monastery was a world apart
at a remove might seem a million miles from the
university. But one of the things I was shocked
to discover when I arrived at Stanford and was riding
my bike along around the lovely 5000 acres, there
was the crypt where Leland and Jane stanford are buried
on the grounds of the debt land that they donated
to the university and that the resemblance between the medieval
monasteries and at least the stanford campus, but in
some ways the land grant given to this university are
striking and striking not just on the physical architectural resemblance
, not just on the quad is kind of protecting
an inner courtyard from a larger world, not just
because the campus is like a different kind of world
and that people regard it differently, but because of
this element of trust, because of the social contract
that says what operates on this campus is somehow different
than what operates elsewhere and that the special legal status
of this campus needs to be reflected in how it
treats its intellectual property and that the basis of that
status is one of trust and its ability to create
something that increases the common good or the common stock
to use john locke expression. And so this idea
for me has been to trace out a history to
show how that contract has been developed and negotiated.
It doesn't always go well. I mean, there's
been many people have been talking recently for probably good
reasons about the McCarthy era in terms of the current
political climate in this country. And I think that
I want to be cautious about that kind of exaggeration
. But the McCarthy era, the damage it did
to academic freedom suggested that we lost sight of the
difference and the trust in this institution. And that
in fact, stanford is that At the basis of
two or three of the well to at least of
the worst cases of academic freedom infringement. When Jane
Stanford fired in economics Professor Edward Ross in about 1906
. And when Bruce Franklin was fired, a tenured
english history professor In the 60s 1960s at Stanford,
there was a line that was crossed, there was
a sense in which what goes on in this institution
isn't different and that what academic freedom is intended to
represent is an element by which there is a trust
in place. Because academic freedom is still based on
a very strong notion of peer review. Academic freedom
is not the right to say anything you want in
the classroom. Academic freedom is the right to engage
in an inquiry, a pursuit of learning that can
be justified in terms of the quality of the work
, in terms of peer review, but that cannot
and should not at least be impeded by external pressures
by those forces at work outside of the university.
Which was the case in jane stanford's element, and
the Bruce franklin is a little more complicated, but
I think it is a case in which the political
position of Bruce franklin interfered with his rights as a
professor on campus. So this idea that the university
has a separate status and that the intellectual property that
we produce has grounds for being treated differently. This
doesn't mean that this intellectual property needs to be free
. It means that we have an argument to discuss
why it isn't free. We have a basis for
saying that the work that is done here is part
of a social contract and that social contract needs to
be recognized to the best of our ability. So
in the era of print, it did not mean
that we need to take by the armload copies of
every journal and get on the buses a blackbird and
hand out the literature. It didn't mean that.
But today, when it costs almost nothing to freely
share and distribute this research, when we are able
to post it online, when libraries are mounting repositories
and sustaining them in a way that would facilitate very
easily the sharing of this research. When this research
might be available to high school classrooms and doctor's offices
in people's homes, we have to ask why that
isn't feasible or possible. We have to ask if
we're not realizing if we're failing to realize the full
common good are common stock that might be realized by
this intellectual property. And so my hope is that
we can begin to use larger arguments than it has
to be free, then we want it to be
free. And that when we talk to our college
, remember some of you've forgotten you've been deputized.
If you just look down and see there's a little
badge right there on your shirt. Yeah, Everyone
. Okay. And and that we need to be
able to say to people there's something larger at issue
because it is the indifference of the university. That
is the problem. It is not the greedy publishers
. That is entirely the problem. At least,
it is the indifference of faculty members and colleagues.
It is the wariness of graduate students concerned about their
professional careers and rightly so. But I would want
to say that we need we're losing sight of and
that we need to be aware of this larger responsibility
and that the university operates within this larger what I'm
calling a social contract. And that if we are
not as it were doing as much as we possibly
can to ensure this access to this knowledge, then
we're not fulfilling that contract. And we're undermining our
own claim. two state support to tax exemption in
the case of my institution and that were undermining the
position of the university in terms of its possible contribution
. Because what we do well in this institution is
we produce a certain kind of knowledge, not the
only kind a certain kind of research and scholarship that
can make a difference not every day and not in
every situation, but on occasion. And that we
believe this knowledge has value on a global basis and
that we're not currently realizing that completely. So I
want to draw to a close here, but I
want to invite questions and concerns and say to you
again that it's a pleasure to be at Virginia tech
because you got me started in this game, maybe
I should be holding you responsible for it. Um
but I do hope that we can turn this 25
with your help uh into 50 in the next few
years. Thank you very much. Mhm, mm
. Mhm. Mhm. And try Yes. You
know, I'm good with the if there any positive
comments, anybody wants to make or a friendly question
, I'm happy to have it. 40 I cannot
one said in Virginia as we all know statement.
Oh, beautiful. I should have played on that
. Yes. The other thing that's interesting was 200
months cars reading that issue of National Geographic and they
have these little fun tax Of them was that of
the 10 organizations that have continually existed for 1000 years
of more uninterrupted. And then six of them are
universities and the other four religious orders. And that
ties the monsters is that those organizations that are in
continual existence. And that to me is the proof
of the social contract that the university has always been
, uh, sustainable, but no, has always
been highly dependent on donors and state support. Um
, and so I think that is a critical element
in the renaissance in earlier periods. There was a
flurry of patronage that you would have. Leonardo da
Vinci had no university support received no grants from NSF
for any other organizations, although a submarine idea.
The military marines, Excuse me. We're looking into
it for a while. But what he did receive
was personal patronage, plato and Aristotle. Personal patronage
but not sustainable and very fickle. In fact,
alexander the great was a patron of Aristotle. It
went bad south killed his nephew. It was just
ugly. So this idea uh, for me at
least is not so much that we have been sustainable
, but that we have a social contract and that
we need to continually renew that contract in light of
new technologies, for example, around this. So
, the moocs are an interesting instance of this as
well. And my university is much more supportive of
moocs than it is of open access. And you
can see these institutions reaching. And I would say
that the movie is a floundering, flopping, big
giant whale of an idea at this point where we're
missing the more more easily realized aspect of sharing our
research. Um and that's we'll see in both cases
, but a very good point. And of course
the monasteries have been very successful in terms of that
longevity as well. That was excellent time in terms
of the orders, other comments or questions, yes
, think no comment on the american history Associate recommended
. And bar mystery district. Yeah, six years
. There's certainly not certainly threat. They say that
a graduate students careers are threats. Bye! Yeah
. So let me talk to the American Historical Association
because I um have a little bit of a history
with them. I was a friend of Roy Rosenzweig
who was a member of the executive of the American
Historical Association and founded the, the media multimedia project
at George Mason. The Help me here Media Center
for New Media and history at George Mason University,
which Sotero and many other wonderful projects. And Roy
worked very hard for open access in the American Historical
Association and his unrelenting efforts finally was realized were realized
. And again, I want to say that the
american Historical Association of any area of scholarship could contribute
to improving the quality of high school education. It's
the american Historical Association and when jay store for one
year gave free access to high school to know to
all school teachers for one year turned out to be
a marketing ploy. But any rate when jay star
gave free access, the history teachers came forward,
lovely anecdotes about how access to that literature changed the
way they taught history. So Roy was able to
convince the American Historical Association to make its journal articles
freely available for a period of time. The irony
for me and that I just have to share with
you is they would not make the book reviews available
free. And it's just a lovely statement about history
because for historians, research articles or throwaways, book
reviews are the precious commodity because of the book in
history. That was a short lived project. So
and Roy passed away way too young and the american
Historical Association revoked any of its open access. And
so the idea and I think it is a problem
in the open access movement. We have been so
focused on research articles. We haven't talked about monographs
and we have in my own project has been guilty
of this being so focused on improving access to research
articles. We have in fact lent more weight to
research articles and decreased as a result, the emphasis
on monographs and that the budgetary shift in the library
has been to pay more and more for journals and
less and less for monographs. So we have,
in a sense made it harder for historians to work
at the unit of thought that they work at and
I would defend the unit of thought the book as
a unit of thought. And again, so part
of my projects work has been to build a monograph
system for open access now to get to the exact
point about the embargo period and it was a mistake
to ever teach them that word in terms of library
use of embargo. I blamed brian here for that
, letting that word out because I had never heard
of that term before. The library started using it
. The question of the thesis is uh one that
appears to be a matter of perception rather than reality
and that is there is no university press that will
publish a dissertation. They will only publish books and
the distance between a dissertation into a book. Actually
, there's a book called this dissertation. Into a
book. Yeah, the University of Toronto Press I
think publishers to make a little ploy for blood for
Canadian university presses. The idea then is that it's
not reducing the chances that the book will be published
in the way they think and that in fact it's
helping historians get jobs because if you can share with
your committee, the hiring committee a copy of your
dissertation, you're one step closer in terms of being
able to promote yourself as a history professor. Um
I don't have any problem in the sense with allowing
people to to do embargoes on their work. I
mean that should be your choice as an academic freedom
question. I do have a problem with the american
historical associations, conservative position and it's it's a sense
of being under siege. Um They have experimented with
melon money on making dissertations into books funding them,
but still in a very conservative way that ended up
costing and not really distributing the books in an open
way. Um, and I work with a final
point of this. I work with Athabasca University Press
. Um, Athabasca University Press, you may not
know at the basket in the far north of Canada
, but it's an open university. It's Canada's Open
University, which means that not that the courses are
free, but it means that you can get into
that university with no explanation of your background, no
justification of your current educational standing. It's open in
the sense of the british open university and they're an
open university. Is there an open access university press
? Every book they publish is free to download.
But every book they publish is sold as an e
book or as print on demand. And the e
books and print on demand have driven the sales.
Excuse me, obviously driven the sales have driven,
sorry driven, the cost will have paid for the
cost of copy editing and layout and the other aspects
of running the press. And so this idea that
open access hurts publishing has not been substantiated. The
idea that open access hurts the chances of a book
going of a manuscript or a dissertation going into the
book hasn't been substantiated. Uh and that history's position
is that there again needs to be a much more
positive. And and one of celebrating their contribution to
the education of all americans. I mean, it
wasn't enough. They got their own history channel,
there's a television channel that they they now have to
feel uncomfortable with it. No, that's not fair
. That's a cheap shot. I could rewind that
tape back on on that one for that. And
that was uncalled for. Um, so I think
the key element here is that we need to be
able to point to the positive sides of things we
need to be able to show and justify. Not
that it's just right to be open access, although
it is, it is. Um, but but
that there is a rationale for that, that that
that we can say to young faculty members that this
will in fact serve your career. Um, and
uh, and then two older faculty members that you're
forgetting the nature of our institution and that contract and
its longevity and that we need to go back to
basic principles and that those basic principles will ultimately reinforce
and strengthen the institution in terms of that social contract
. Yes. Would you comment on the recent article
? I can't remember Science in science, you didn't
brian you don't have to help her on this where
we could have gone over I could have said oh
the article in uh the economist you mean about the
success of open access now. Uh So Karen referring
to uh a recent article in Science magazine of only
about four weeks ago, it wasn't so much an
article as a sting uh in which An enterprising journalist
sent out 300 articles to open access journals that charge
an article processing fee to the authors. Uh And
the article that he sent out had a uh looked
and felt and smelled like a research science article but
had a few uh serious flaws in its handling of
the data. Um and that it should not have
been published. Um But sure enough the majority of
the journals that he chose the author, uh Vanhanen
, I think his name was John Bohannon. Uh
The majority of the journals that Vanhanen chose accepted the
article and asked for the fee to publish the flawed
article and provided no indication of a peer review.
And clearly if they had had a peer review,
it had failed to catch this article and all of
these journals were open access and fee charging. So
clearly open access is bad and that clearly open access
has failed as an enterprise and clearly we should forbid
and ban all open access journals. And clearly science
had no particular vested interest in this kind of research
as a subscription journal. In terms of open access
, there have been many critiques of that. Of
course all of my colleagues rose to the occasion and
pointed out all the flaws in terms of its own
research and that in fact Jon bon Hannan's articles should
not have been accepted and would not have passed peer
review. But that seems to me petty minded and
small in a way because half the articles did accept
the article is gonna be, half the journals did
accept the article. So there is a problem.
There are bad open access journal out there. Okay
, can we be clear about this? They are
very bad. Unscrupulous journals that are looking for money
and are not conducting the proper kind of proper kind
of peer review and I am a very strong believer
in peer reviews. I had a chance to talk
about earlier today, very strong believer that it improves
the quality doesn't just gate keep it doesn't just keep
out the bad, it does some of that but
it improves the quality of work. But I also
know that nature and science have both been caught in
the fabrication of data. I also know that all
of the peer reviewed our journalist that I've been involved
with have one time or another run into plagiarism issues
and that there is always a need for vigilance and
that the system is not, they are proof are
foolproof. But that right now there is a kind
of topsy turvy aspect to the publishing industry and that
people are trying to take advantage of this. And
I think that well, you ask yourself when you
look at these journals, I don't know if you've
had a chance to look at some of the journals
that accepted the article. They don't have editorial boards
, They don't seem to have a focus. They're
not laid out in a way that looks like journals
are just not and some of them actually use our
software. And so that has been a little bit
of an embarrassment. We lowered the barrier as it
were, we made our software freely available, but
they still aren't able to really create a sense ability
around what a journal should be. So I think
we do need to have stings. I do think
we do need to expose that there are unscrupulous journals
. And I do think we need to educate people
around what a good journal is and how to ask
questions about it. And I think that what Jon
bon hanen did better than anything else is, he
withdrew his article from those journals that accepted it and
from those journals who didn't accept, we didn't have
to review reduced, didn't have to withdraw from those
who didn't accept it. Um and he established a
precedent and I think that's the best lesson of this
, that if an article accepts. If a journal
accepts your article without any indication of peer reviewed,
I know your articles won't be flawed, but if
it accepts and there is no indication of that review
that helps you improve your work, then you withdraw
it. And that more than that we need to
create a place where people can talk about this.
We need a place where people can not peer review
the peer reviewed journals so much but that we can
start talking about the journals that matter because there are
new and innovative journals and we can start to make
decisions about where we publish things in a more critical
fashion as we always have. Like how could it
happen that someone wouldn't get advice or mentorship about where
should I publish something? And there is a developing
world aspect to this too that we need to consider
. And that is many of these journals that are
called predatory journals come from the developing world. They
are part of a kind of mail scam sensibility that
we have in this world and that they're charging.
And this is the kind of the irony they're charging
$100 instead of$3000 that the commercial publishers are charging
today for open access and for that$100 that are
not giving you a peer review while the$3000 journal
is. And so there's some questions about value and
costs and all of this. But the key element
is that we need to share our knowledge about where
to publish and y to publish. We need to
see that we have a global responsibility and that scholars
in the developing world don't have the experience, perhaps
are not living within a highly intense research publishing culture
and that we need to be understanding of that.
And we need to do what we can to make
sure that it's clear when journalists have that quality,
how we do that. Some of us are thinking
about ways in which there is a place you can
report. There is a place where you can share
this information. But I think the key is that
this isn't a threat To show that we've got scammed
. I mean, what if he had done this
? What if he responded to 300 emails about certain
physical enhancements of his being and then reported that in
fact only half of them, more than half of
them didn't really work for him. What we think
of this as some kind of outrageous? Well,
I'm going to stop using email. That's it.
I'm done with email right now. That's again,
it's the end of the talk. I want a
little slack on this. The upshot of it is
is that open access isn't the answer that open access
has nowhere near begun to settle itself out in terms
of a market in terms of reliability and trust and
that we do have to be wary. But you
could avoid the whole open access market and all you
would lose as a faculty member of graduate student is
readership and citations because open access increases your readership and
your citations. So at this point, if you
do take an overly cautious position as the american historical
association is doing, there are things you're going to
forsake. And I would say, and I would
hope that if you're at Virginia Tech That lead in
the 90s, that lead in the 80's Tyler,
that you would be thinking about ways of doing this
smartly and carefully and critically, but that you would
be thinking about ways of increasing your contribution to the
common wealth, as it were, of the people
of Virginia and the people of this country, and
the people of the world just seems too obvious to
me. I guess we're ready for dinner. Thank
you all very much pleasure.